Numerical And Experimental Study Of Thermoelectric Module In The Photovoltaic Thermoelectric Hybrid System

The development and utilization of new energy has become a hot spot by today’sresearchers as a rise result of the serious energy problem. The photovoltaic thermoelectrichybrid power generation technology is a new energy utilization method based on solar fullspectral, this paper focus on the thermoelectric module and make a design and optimization,after that, the optimization design of the thermal sink is proposed according to thethermoelectric module.First, the scale requirements of the photovoltaic thermoelectric hybridpowergeneration distributed system is5~10KW, and the thermoelectric efficiency needs to above5%of the totally25%efficiency of the hybrid system. The hot side of the thermoelectricmodule needs to reach500℃to meet the efficiency requirement, and we need to designnew thermoelectric generator devices worked between that wide temperature range. Thefirst part of this paper discussed a new method and analyzed the influence of thermoelectricgenerator’s parameters such as segmentation ratio, legs area ratio, materials parameters,load and contact heat resistance based on its precision evaluation, and the curves of twosegmented thermoelectric generator and three segmented thermoelectric generator betweenthe efficiency and thermoelectric parameters are given respectively.Second, the optimization of the thermal sink in the thermoelectric module was madebased on the structure designed by the last part. The influences of the fin’s length, basethickness and the thermal sink’s angle to the gravity direction have been discussed withinthe ANSYS numerical simulation software.Then, an experimental study for thethermoelectric module of photovoltaic thermoelectric hybrid system was proposed, theinfluence of a tube heat exchange had been analyzed by testing it on the designedthermoelectric power generation performance test platform.The energy flow, system integration and energy losses were discussed in the last part,the results and conclusions from this thesis could provide the important insights to thedesign and optimization of Photovoltaic thermoelectric hybrid system.